"If every member of the House
of Representatives and Senate had received 100letters from people
back home saying we have to do somethingaboutRwanda,
when the crisis was first developing then I think the
response would have been different." - Senator Paul
Simon

THE
PROBLEM

Genocide
is raging in Darfur. The Government of Sudan (GOS) and Arab
militias the GOS supports are killing Sudanese black Africans of all ages simply
because of their ethnic identities.Nearly
every black African village in Darfur has now been destroyed. The GOS intends to crush black African
rebel groups and to rid Darfur
of black Africans once and for all. The estimates of deaths in Darfur now range between 100,000 and 350,000.
While the international community frets, makes idle threats (such as sanctions
that are never imposed), and engages in talk about whether this is really genocide
and what should be done, hundreds
of innocent victims continue to die daily.Meanwhile GOS troops
and their Arab militia allies (known as the Janjaweed
or devils on horseback) attack, rape and murder with impunity.

The
international community is not only comprised of individual nations, regional
organizations and intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations.
Every single human being is a member of the international community. We are all
our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers when genocide erupts anywhere at anytime for
any reason. Those nations, organizations and individuals that do not act to stop
the genocide become bystanders to genocide.

We,
Samuel Totten and Eric Markusen, feel a
particular sense of responsibility because, as members of the Atrocities
Documentation Team sent by the U.S. Government to the Chad/Sudan border
to investigate allegations of genocide, we personally witnessed the suffering
of refugees and listened to their heartbreaking stories of being raped, injured,
losing loved ones to mass murder, and facing disease
and hunger.

A
POSSIBLE SOLUTION

: "Make more noise!"

In her Pulitzer-prize
winning book, "A Problem from Hell": America in the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power
surmises that

The
real reason the United States
did not do what it couldand should have done
to stop genocide [in the past] was not alack of knowledge or
influence but a lack of will. Simply put,American leaders did not act because they did
not want to...The
executive branch has felt no pressure from the home front. American leaders have
been able to persist in turning away because genocide
in distant lands has not captivated senators, congressional caucuses, Washington
lobbyists, elite opinionstop genocide has thus
been repeatedly lost in the realm of domestic politics.
Although isolated voices have protested theslaughter, Americans
outside the executive branch were largelymute when it mattered.
As a result of this society-wide silence,officials at all levels
of governments calculated that the political costs
of getting involved in stopping genocide far exceeded thecosts of remaining uniformed....It takes political pressure to put genocide
on the map in Washington [D.C.]. When Alison Des Forges
of Human RightsWatch met with NationalSecurityAdviserAnthonyLake
two weeks into the Rwanda
genocide, he informed her that the phoneswere not ringing. "Make
more noise!" he urged. Because so littlenoise has been made
about genocide, U.S.
decision-makers haveopposedU.S.
intervention, telling themselves that they were doing all
the could--and , most important, all they should --in light ofcompeting American interests
and a highly circumscribed understanding
of what was domestically "possible" for the United
Statesto
do (pp. 508-509).

In the same book, Power
reported the following-- and we think, revelatory-- statement:

Senator
Paul Simon (D.Ill.) [now deceased], chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee believes publicpressure might have
alerted the U.S.
response [to the outbreakof the Rwandan
genocide in 1994]. "If every member of the [U.S.]House of Representatives and [U.S.]
Senate had received 100letters from people
back home saying we have to do somethingaboutRwanda,
when the crisis was first developing then I think the response would have
been different" (p. 377).

THE
ACTIONS WE URGE YOU TO TAKE

With
ever fiber of our being, we urge every person who receives this message or reads
it on this website to take action as follows:

Simply
write a short note to your U.S. Representative and your U.S.
Senators and e-mail it to each of them. The note can be as simple as "I implore
you to act to stop the genocide in Darfur, and to do so now.”Please
send a copy of your e-mails to Samuel Totten at stotten@uark.edu so we can keep track of how
many e-mails are sent.

You
can easily obtain the addresses of your representative and senators by using the
search engine: www.congress.orgWhen you reach the website, simply
type in your zip code and you will be given names and e-mail addresses.For postal address, phone, and fax numbers, just click on “more info.”

High
Commissioner for Human Rights Louise ArbourOffice of the High Commissioner
for Human Rights, United Nations Office at Geneva, 1211 Geneva 10, Switzerlandwebsite:
www.ohchr.org/english/about/hc/arbour.htm